Teknobyen student housing in Trondheim is the outcome of a winning entry of Europan 9. The building has been nominated to the Norwegian National Building Prize in 2012 and has won the Trondheim Kommune Energy Saving Prize.
Pocket Worlds
The project unifies situations of extreme intimacy with those of extroversion and collaboration. A room is a powerful mechanism that allows the expansion of the identity, self-recognition and reaffirmation, interchange and negotiation. One’s own space is a laboratory where to test abilities that later will be experienced in every act of social interaction. Teknobyen student's housing proposes the compression, transfer and conditioning of the relational capacities of urban space.
Social Catalyst
The core of the building contains a multipurpose lounge with no hierarchy, or spatial definition, in which different ambiances are located. Room floors surround this lounge. The general layout is articulated by stripes occupying the space as they approach or distance the existing limits. Rooms mimic the building's internal scheme, structured in functional bands (storage, prefabricated bathroom and a bed).
In order to achieve a collective-driven atmosphere, students share a flexible lounge and a self-managed, ‘ultrakitchen’, designed as an experimental space for the use and simultaneous enjoyment of 116 students, a 24/24 social condenser. This way of structuring common space trough collective actions as a means to strengthen the bonds within the newly established community impell dwellers to come up with rules, responsibilities and unexpected ways of counterbalancing interests.
The building can be looked upon as something that is unfinished, because it calls for permanent completion by its inhabitants in seek for a more satisfying community life.
Students are free to creatively appropriate the collective space, an architectural environment that has been designed looking for functional openness. The building contains a parliament of 116 people, and the shared kitchen is where common life is negotiated, through consistent self management, but also small everyday-based events like facebook meetings, pancake contests in the kitchen, cooking seminars held by tv celebrities or site-specific building – olympics.
Beyond formal pervasiveness or image creation, Teknobyen student housing stresses the importance of social, financial and environmental innovation by creating an updated and dynamic way of life for students, a key social ecology for nowadays society, maximizing social bonds within modest yet committed architecture.
